If you don’t feel you can nominate Overlawyered in good conscience, Lowering the Bar would make a good blog to nominate.
Finally: California moves to curtail ADA shakedowns
AP: “SB1186 by Democratic Senate leader Darrell Steinberg and Republican Sen. Bob Dutton would ban so-called ‘demand letters’ in which lawyers threaten to sue over a violation unless a business pays a set amount. It also would require attorneys to give businesses notice before filing a lawsuit.” Sacramento Bee: “A key element of SB 1186 is that potential damages for disability access violations would drop from a minimum of $4,000 to much less, $2,000 in some cases, $1,000 in others, if the defendant corrected violations very quickly.” The damages would still remain higher than are available in most states, however, and “one-way” attorney fee shifts would remain available. The bill would also restrict “stacking” of multiple damage demands based on repeat visits to premises before the suit is heard. More: The Recorder.
We’ve been covering the disgrace of California access litigation for years and years. Because large sums will still be recoverable under the new rules, I expect the industry of complaint-filing will continue in some form, even if it becomes somewhat less lucrative.
Asset forfeiture horror stories: the podcast
Caleb Brown interviews me for Cato’s podcast series on some of the stories in yesterday’s post.
Sued if you do dept.: unhappy town hall in New Jersey
Parsippany, N.J. hired a new town clerk last year, but her tenure does not seem to have proved a long or happy one: four office employees soon filed complaints against her, “charging her with making racial, sexual and religious statements that left them feeling uncomfortable in the workplace,” and she filed counter-complaints. “All of the grievances were dismissed by township administration, and both sides filed suit against the town.” Now the town has paid $200,000 to resolve the former town clerk’s claims, which she has not elaborated publicly on advice of counsel, while the status of the office workers’ $4 million claim is not clear. [Parsippany Patch via NJLRA]
Pharmaceutical roundup
- “In light of drug safety concerns, the FDA has made it difficult for companies to get new antibiotics approved.” Might this possibly tie in with the article’s theme that the economics of antibiotic research has turned sharply unfavorable despite a dire perceived need for new compounds? [WaPo; background, Avik Roy, Forbes; Josh Bloom, NY Post, on the coming gonorrhea epidemic]
- Congress considers restoring asthma inhaler access [Angela Logomasini/CEI, earlier]
- Righteous Derek Lowe rant on pharmaceutical innovation [vs. British Medical Journal; Pipeline/Corante]
- Things the New York Times left out of its FDA spygate coverage [Jon Entine, Forbes]
- Bill signed by President last month includes provisions attempting to address drug manufacturing shortages [Abnormal Use, earlier] Lawsuit against drug maker for withdrawing drug from market fails [Beck, Drug and Device Law]
- Regulation-by-litigation striking out in drug pricing cases? [Cruz-Alvarez & Sherr, WLF]
- The Seroquel black box warns of what, exactly, now? [White Coat]
CFPB recruits for “surveillance activities”
A recruitment ad for the newly established Consumer Financial Protection Bureau seeks investigators qualified to “establish and conduct surveillance activity to develop both intelligence and evidence to further investigations,” for matters that include “delicate matters, issues and investigative problems for which there are few, if any, established criteria.” Among the job duties: retain and oversee private investigators who might pose as consumers of financial services.
A similar plan at the Department of Health and Human Services was scrapped last year after some members of Congress complained that it amounted to spying. Health officials wanted to send “mystery shoppers” into doctors’ offices to gauge Medicaid and Medicare patients’ access to primary care physicians.
The agency says it intends to operate in accord with law and respect individuals’ privacy rights. [Washington Times via Kevin Funnell]
“Talk about my past lawsuits? See you in court”
Someone who’s sued a past employer might be eager to keep that fact off the search-engine record, but the First Amendment protects the right to disseminate information of that sort. [Volokh]
Asset forfeiture roundup
- Press accounts have exposed a pattern of police stops of out of state motorists in rural Tennessee, in which police search motorists’ cars and then confiscate large sums of money they find on the presumption that it is criminal-related. Now, in Henry, Tennessee — named after Patrick Henry, of “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” fame — the police chief has told the town he needs a police dog because “the city is missing out on possible revenues” [dog testimonials; more Tennessee, via Eapen Thampy of Americans for Forfeiture Reform, guestblogging last month at Radley Balko’s Agitator site]
- Also via Thampy, economically hard-hit Butte County, California, north of Sacramento, has been filling its budget hole through pot-grower busts accompanied by aggressive forfeitures; in a perhaps not unrelated phenomenon, the county snatches kids from parents at an exceedingly high rate. More on child protective services in Butte County at the Chico News & Review (& more: Angela Bacca, SKUNK).
- Via Ilya Somin, this from a Steven Greenhut column:
Few groups of “sinners” were singled out in biblical accounts more than “tax collectors,” who were not merely state agents collecting revenues that taxpayers rightfully owed to the government. They were the source of particular loathing because they were extortionists, who profited personally by shaking down as much money from citizens as possible…
The Gospel accounts provide an early lesson in the danger of marrying the profit motive with governmental power. The possibility for abuse is great. Yet throughout the United States, government agencies increasingly rely on “civil forfeiture” to bolster their strained budgets. The more assets these modern-day tax collectors seize, the more money they have for new equipment and other things….
- From reader John Brewer, on an Ohio gardening-equipment seizure: “Structurally, it seems even worse to have the judge who originally signed the search warrant have a say in what gets done with the confiscated stuff than it does for the cops/DA to get it, despite the cute-and-cuddly outcome here.”
- Tomorrow’s abuses today: the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms [BATF] has just been given a major enhancement to its forfeiture powers. [David Kopel/Volokh]
- For more information on this subject, check out the many online resources offered by the Cato Institute; Cato scholars took an early interest in exposing the problems of civil and criminal asset forfeiture, and our focus on the issue continues to this day. More: Scott Greenfield. (& Tim Lynch, PoliceMisconduct.net)
Rent to you? Sure. Meet you? Heck, no
Douglas Hsiao in the Washington Post on the legal hazards of renting out an apartment under the laws of Washington, D.C., which make it suspect for a landlord to put ceilings on the number of tenants (that might constitute “family discrimination”) or inquire into whether an applicant is earning money at a legal trade (“source of income” discrimination):
And finally, this: I asked my property manager whether we could meet with potential tenants and interview them. She told me that, as a general rule, she does not like to meet any potential tenants. Why? Because if you never meet them, you cannot be accused of discriminating against them. It would be funny if it were not so Kafkaesque.
Comcast v. Behrend: class actions at the Supreme Court
For many years, under a widespread interpretation of a 1974 Supreme Court case called Eisen v. Carlisle & Jacquelin, many courts believed that in deciding whether to certify a lawsuit as a class action they were not authorized to look ahead to the suit’s merits, even if the evidence at hand suggested those merits to be fatally flawed. In its landmark decision in Wal-Mart v. Dukes, however, the Court made clear that determining whether the prerequisites for class handling have been satisfied will frequently call on courts to consider and resolve questions that overlap the merits. But the exact application of Dukes has yet to be worked out, and lower courts are generating inconsistent results.
The Court has agreed to take up these questions again in a case called Comcast v. Behrend. The Third Circuit, considering an antitrust case challenging Comcast’s business practices in communities around Philadelphia as anticompetitive, upheld certification despite Comcast’s argument that some members of the plaintiff class could not have suffered injury; in particular, it rejected Comcast’s argument that the judge should subject the views of the plaintiff’s expert on damages to Daubert scrutiny to determine whether those views were based on principles accepted by the relevant scientific community.
Now the Cato Institute has filed an amicus brief (to quote my colleague Ilya Shapiro)
urging the Court to clarify that what it meant in Dukes was that a full inquiry into the reliability and admissibility of expert testimony (a so-called Daubert inquiry) is required at the class-certification stage. A lower standard would obviously prejudice defendants because class certification “magnifies and strengthens the number of unmeritorious claims” and creates “insurmountable pressure on defendants to settle.” But it would also prejudice absent class members because certification based on inadmissible evidence may distort their perception of the likelihood of success and encourage the members to stay in the class. Since all class members who don’t opt out of the class are ultimately bound by a class action judgment, there’s a large potential for harm to these potentially valid claims as well.
For more background on the facts and legal implications of Comcast v. Behrend, see the Philadelphia Inquirer’s coverage, Paul Karlsgodt, and Sean Wajert and, on the related case of Gates v. Rohm & Haas, Andrew Trask.